Bobthebirder's Video Blog

Southwell, Portland
Monday October 1st 2012

Another failed trip to see a rarity that ended up with me filming something completely different.

Today there was a red-backed shrike on Portland, but I was about the only person not to see it.
Anyway, I found myself on the Eastcliffs near Southwell, so I thought I'd drop in on my old mates the wall lizards to see if they were at home.
They were.

I soon found this tiny little juvenile lizard hunting for food amongst the rocks at my feet.
Nobody seems to know why there are wall lizards on Portland, as they are normally a species of mainland Europe.
They may have come across on someone's car; or they may have been deliberately introduced; or perhaps they have always been here but were only noticed recently.
Here you can see the lizard squeezing itself in a typical resting place in a crack in the rock.

Next I found a much larger adult female wall lizard.
These are about the same size as our common lizard but they have bigger heads and jaws with longer legs and toes.
The stripey pattern is quite distinctive but individual wall lizards do vary quite a bit.
The round white spots along the flanks and legs are a good way to separate them from common lizards.
Wall lizards also like to run up vertical rock faces a lot, which makes them very easy to see where they are found.

When I first looked at this sequence on my computer I noticed the snail which appears to be determined to stop the lizard from having a snooze by tickling it under the arm!
In the next video it gets disturbed by an ant!

I don't know what all the nose rubbing is about; perhaps it is starting to moult its skin.
I wonder if the snail was trying to feed on the dead skin?

I managed to get pretty close to it before it finally got fed up with all the disturbance from snails, ants and photographers and scurried away.
Sorry about all the wind noise on these videos but I was stood on top of the Portland cliffs!

Finally here's the common lizard I filmed at Moreton Forest to show how different they are from wall lizards.
You'll have to be quick though.